I am … flabbergasted … that
the Labour party has decided to commit suicide today. (Sunday 27 June,
2016).

Hilary Benn and friends have basically just declared that they
want Nigel Farage to be Prime Minister.

It takes stupendous incompetence
to make Nigel Farage into the most successful and competent party leader
in England. But right now, that’s what he is. A leader who actually
leads his party. And achieves the things he sets out to do.

Welcome to
the age of stupid.

So … what happened is this. We are out of Europe
because Cameron did a rash thing that backfired. And a lot of
traditional working-class Labour voters were sold a simplistic story by
the far-right, that immigrants were the reason for all the things that
were wrong in their lives and the economy. (Rather than, say, the 2008
crash, and Cameron and George Osborne’s austerity policies over the last
6 years)

So, the anti-Corbyn faction have spun that into the idea that
it’s Labour’s fault that the referendum went Brexit. And, in
particular, those who have beef with Corbyn, have decided to jump on the
bandwagon and claim that it’s particularly Corbyn’s fault for being
lukewarm on European membership; a reluctant Remain. It’s Corbyn wot
lost it.

Well, guess what. While a majority of Labour voted to remain, a sizeable chunk of Labour voted to leave. Labour IS conflicted over
Europe; the working class haven’t seen much of the benefit of
membership. And even remainers are sceptical. In other words, Corbyn’s
lukewarm attitude to Europe far more accurately reflects the opinion of
Labour membership and its traditional voters than any enthusiastic
Europhilia does.

Now most of Corbyn’s enemies are from the right of
Labour. The Blairite or New Labour side. Those who strongly believe that
to win, Labour needs to recapture the political centre and the
middle-class.

Maybe. But meanwhile, Labour is STILL haemorrhaging its
actual, real (as opposed to potential) support among the working class.
The SNP have taken its voters away from it in Scotland. UKIP is now
taking working class voters away from it in the rest of England.But
according to today’s plotters, Labour must orient itself yet further
towards the interest of the urban elites; be louder and more dedicated
in espousing them.

Except, simultaneously, it needs to also listen to the
“real concerns” that labour voters have about immigration. And,
ironically, Corbyn is both accused of bringing up questions like the
TTIP which are allegedly “irrelevant” to people on the doorstep (despite
being one of the most fundamental changes in legislation that Europe
was bringing to the UK) AND of “lack of leadership” (ie. not just
pandering to the crowd and media talking points)

He’s damned when he
does reflect Labour voters (ie. is lukewarm) and damned when he doesn’t
(ie. tries to talk about bigger issues, defends immigration)

(As a
comparison, imagine this was an uprising by pro-Brexit Labour MPs, led
by Kate Huey, claiming that Corbyn had backed the wrong horse and was
out of step with supporters. At least that argument would have the
benefit of coherence.)

The real delusion is this :

The Labour Party is
being torn apart by historical forces that are far bigger than Jeremy
Corbyn and his enemies. It serves multiple constituencies whose
interests (economic, political and ideological) are diverging
alarmingly. It finds it harder and harder to find positions that appeal
to all these constituencies and whenever it speaks up for one, it
alienates the others just a little bit more. (Perhaps Labour in any real
sense, as the coalition of working class economic interest and
middle-class liberal cultural interests is finished. Along with
the second-wave industrial economy that spawned that alliance.)

And
Corbyn’s critics are right. With his fusty old beliefs and principles,
perhaps he can’t reunite these different factions.

But the reason they’re
delusional is that neither can anyone else.

Corbyn’s critics, who blame
him personally him for this, are fantasizing about a unicorn politician,
someone who can magically be on everyone’s side at the same time :
pro-Europe, pro-market, pro globalization, low taxing, liked by the
right-wing media, and also pro-working class, protecting them from the
competition that immigrants and globalization bring, offering more
services etc. etc.In other words, they want a Trump-like, post-truth
politician with the ability to tell everyone what they want to hear
while not getting caught out. Basically, they’re hoping for their very
own Boris Johnson. Blair with added xenophobia.

But even if you
passionately believe in unicorns, and think Corbyn needs to be replaced
by one. You still ought to wait for the unicorn to arrive. Not just make
a unicorn-shaped hole in the hope that one will turn up to fill it.

Let’s
consider a couple of things :

1) The space of being right-wing of the
Labour party while being nicer than the Tories, is already occupied by
the Liberal Democrats. And they have long found very meagre pickings in
that zone. They have to content themselves to just playing the “we’re
the opposite of whoever you don’t like” game at the local level.

The
only time the LibDems did well, was as a way for left-wingers to protest
against Blair’s support for the Iraq War. The moment they went back to
pitching themselves as “saner Tories”, they were wiped out. This is a
common delusion but there is no “there, there” in the centre of British
politics. If there was, the LibDems would have ruled the country for
decades.

2) why did Corbyn win the leadership of the Labour Party in the
first place? The utter lack of plausible alternatives. Everyone else in
the campaign couldn’t articulate any position beyond “tell me who you
want me to be”. And that went down like a lead balloon.

Things are no
better now. If Corbyn goes, we know there are no unicorn populists in
the Labour Party who are waiting to fill that vacuum. There’s no one
with that magical ability to appeal to everyone. We know this because if
there were such a politician in Labour today, then we’d have already
heard from him (or her). They’d have already been prominent within the
Remain campaign. They’d have been out there with Alan Johnson winning
hearts and making headlines. Corbyn wouldn’t (and couldn’t) have stopped
that (despite his enemies trying to talk up a story of “sabotage”). Any
of today’s shadow cabinet resigners could have been out there making a
name for themselves saying brilliant things if they had it in them to do
it.

In practice, Labour was collectively lacklustre. It was
collectively lacklustre because it really is between a rock and a hard
place. The ONLY people who can argue that you can have the economic
liberalism of the EU AND protectionist anti immigration policies are
barefaced liars like Johnson and Farage. And, to their credit, Labour
wasn’t shameless enough to try to promise that. Even if the cost was
saying very little of consequence.

So, Labour had big problems in the referendum. But
Corbyn is a symptom, not a cause, of them.

This week, David Cameron, the
great Tory “success” of recent years, has been humiliated , revealed as
making a spectacular error of judgement and has fallen. Meanwhile Boris
Johnson is getting revealed as spectacularly dishonest. The entire
tissue of lies that is the Brexit campaign is unravelling. The financial
markets are in free-fall.

This is ALL the fault of right-wing
incompetence.If Labour went on holiday for a month, they should be 10
points ahead when they came back.

Instead, a bunch of self-indulgent MPs,
blinded by their own anger, confusion and frustration at Brexit and
panic over a near election, have decided this would be an ideal week to
turn in on themselves and break the Labour Party. Possibly for good.

In
the run up to an early general election (if it comes within the next 12
months) the story coming out of Labour should be ALL about how allegedly
“safe” Conservative hands clumsily dropped and broke the economy while
UKIP were telling outrageous porkies.

Instead the message will be a
confusing internal squabble about whether, in this party that almost
entirely supported remain, the leadership was enthusiastic enough
in its support for Europe. Despite that position being an overall
vote-loser.

Genius!

Instead of recognizing the fundamental challenges that
the 21st century presents to centre-left politics and parties : global
capitalism, high-speed finance, mass automation threatening most
traditional employment, mass movements of people due to continual unrest
and wars, climate change, social media, cryptography, blockchains etc.
etc. MPs in the “shadow cabinet”, the aspiring government in waiting, are
trying to personalize everything as Corbyn’s fault, and fantasize that
by getting rid of the hated leader, their unicorn saviour will magically
appear and heal the contradictions in the party, reunite them and make
everything OK with the electorate.

Now THAT is delusional.

If Labour
spends the next 6 months infighting, as other lacklustre non-entities
demand their turn to wilt in the spotlight of leadership, then the
beneficiary will be UKIP, whose pitch to the working-class will be “we
know what we stand for, we get things done (though we still haven’t
managed to purge ourselves of these immigrants because of Tory
prevarication)”. They’ll take an even bigger slice of working-class
voters from Labour, perhaps finally winning enough seats to force the
Tories into coalition.

Anyone who believes a “nationalist” party can’t
take the working class away from Labour should look to Scotland. And the
rise of far right parties in the rest of Europe.

Farage has already
pwned the Tory party, by spooking Cameron into giving him the referendum
that he can now claim credit for winning. He’s actually had Tory
leavers dancing to the tune of his propaganda campaigns. Now imagine a
coalition government with, say, Theresa May as notional prime-minister
and Farage as deputy. It wouldn’t take long for him to grab the oxygen
and become its public face (and perhaps driving force).

What stands
between us and that future is a united Labour party. Letter after letter
of shadow cabinet resigners stress that and say that Corbyn can’t unite
Labour. But it’s a self-fulfilling prophecy. It’s they who have decided
to refuse to be united under Corbyn.

When they say that he failed
because he failed to stop Brexit, they aren’t speaking for the 52% of
the country that voted FOR Brexit. They aren’t speaking for the
membership of the Labour Party that overwhelmingly voted Corbyn. They
aren’t speaking for the working class that was ambivalent about the
benefits of the EU and tempted to take a punt on something different.
They’re just publicly broadcasting their own cluelessness about the
contradictions within the Labour Party. And their willingness to try to
pin the blame on someone else.

It won’t end well. Corbyn has a mandate from
Labour members and supporters. He’s always put his principle over toeing
the party line, even when it made him unpopular. He has no reason to
think that this upswing against him has any more principle behind it
than naked fear and ambition.

So I think he’ll fight it. And we’ll see
Labour collapse into an angry, bad tempered leadership contest, with no
obviously strong / charismatic alternative to Corbyn coming forward.

Either Corbyn wins it leaving his detractors smouldering with resentment
and denuding the front-bench of even their meagre talents. Or someone
else comes through, who MPs like better but proves equally incapable of
solving the fundamental contradictions that Labour faces, but does drive
away the enthusiastic supporters who came on-board for and with
Corbyn.

Most likely you’ll see a very ugly competition where some
candidates espouse anti-immigration policies direct from UKIP, scaring
away liberal London, while Europhile Blairites tell a tired Polyannaish
story about the benefits of globalization that reinforces their
out-of-touchness with Labour voters in post-industrial regions.

Labour
was falling apart anyway, due to historical trends. But this coup is
like trying to arrest that process by hitting it with a big hammer. All
it will do is accelerate the fragmentation.

Monday, June 13, 2016

I'm not doing Platform Wars any more. But this seems big enough to deserve a comment. (quoting my Quora answer)

Microsoft has a history of buying fairly big, reasonable tech. brands that OUGHT to offer them an interesting direction to evolve strategically ...and then wasting them by leaving them wither into insignificance.
That's what they did with Skype, which they should have been able to evolve into a messaging app. competing with, and as compelling as, Whatsapp / Telegram / FB Messenger / Snapchat etc. Instead it's fading into obscurity.
They did it spectacularly with Nokia. Who now make almost no smart-phones for no noticeable improvement in Windows Phone sales.
They'll probably do this with LinkedIn.
It’s possible that under Satya Nadella things will be different. But the traditional M$ problem is that it tries to use the new acquisition to prop up Microsoft’s existing brands and strategies (ie. Windows, Office, Azure) rather than allowing the acquisition to suggest new strategies and exploring the new opportunities it brings.
Now LinkedIn itself was sliding into a bit of a decline. I think there was very little vision about what a disruptive, world-changing employment platform could be (eg. Phil Jones' answer to Why hasn't anyone disrupted LinkedIn yet? )
To recap, what if LinkedIn wasn’t just Yet Another Social Network left in the wake of Facebook’s dominance? What if LinkedIn’s “big hairy audacious goal” was something like “to double the world’s income”. (ie. to provide whatever will help its users earn more each year … whether by finding better paying jobs, doing more gigs on the side, being better matched with the right job, identifying and getting whatever training makes them more valuable to the market, learning how to negotiate better etc. etc.) To execute on that mission would put LinkedIn in the same league as Google / Facebook / Apple etc. The moment you think like that, multiple new directions, opportunities, potential income streams etc. simply fall out of it.
Now, is that a possibility under Microsoft ownership? Who knows? Nadella isn’t Ballmer. He, says he’s willing to change Microsoft. But it’s hard to know how big his vision is. Or how much he’s still trapped by the traditional forces and attitudes within Microsoft.
So this is another (and almost the last) chance for Microsoft to buy themselves into the social platform big league. They may be ready to do something interesting. But they squandered an amazing opportunity with Skype. And early talk about how they’re thinking of effectively using the community to sell Microsoft products to and analyze data from isn’t that encouraging.
I’d look for some kind of big insightful statement from Nadella before I get very excited about this.
Right now … the evidence is ambiguous : Read Microsoft CEO’s memo to staff about LinkedIn acquisition